Mideast Coverage

Arab Media Portray War as Killing Field

By SUSAN SACHS

Published: April 4, 2003

CAIRO, April 3 — It was a picture of Arab grief and rage. A teenage boy glared from the rubble of a bombed building as a veiled woman wept over the body of a relative.

In fact, it was two pictures: one from the American-led war in Iraq and the other from the Palestinian territories, blended into one image this week on the Web site of the popular Saudi daily newspaper Al Watan.

The meaning would be clear to any Arab reader: what is happening in Iraq is part of one continuous brutal assault by America and its allies on defenseless Arabs, wherever they are.

As the Iraq war moved into its third week, the media in the region have increasingly fused images and enemies from this and other conflicts into a single bloodstained tableau.

The Israeli flag is superimposed on the American flag. The Crusades and the 13th-century Mongul sack of Baghdad, recalled as barbarian attacks on Arab civilization, are used as synonyms for the American-led invasion of Iraq.

Horrific vignettes of the helpless — armless children, crushed babies, stunned mothers — cascade into Arab living rooms from the front pages of newspapers and television screens.

For Arab leaders and Arab moderates, supported by Washington, the war has become a political crisis of street protests, militant calls for holy war and bitter public criticism of their ties to the United States.

They had hoped for a short war with a minimum of inflammatory pictures of Iraqi civilian casualties. Instead, the daily message to the public from much of the media is that American troops are callous killers, that only resistance to the United States can redeem Arab pride and that the Iraqis are fighting a pan-Arab battle for self-respect.

"The media are playing a very dangerous game in this conflict," said Abdel Moneim Said, director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "When you see the vocabulary and the images used, it is actually bringing everybody to the worst nightmare — the clash of civilizations."

Sensationalism has not gripped all media. Some mainline government-owned newspapers like the staid Al Ahram in Egypt and two of the privately owned international Arabic papers based in London, Al Hayat and Asharq Al Awsat, have reported the war in neutral language. They show bandaged victims in Iraqi hospitals but not the gory pictures of ripped bodies that fill the pages of their competitors.

Government control of the media is not the issue in any case, since nearly all newspapers in the Arab world, including those with the most savage coverage of the American invasion, publish at the pleasure of the governments.

In most countries, the government appoints all newspaper editors, including the so-called opposition press. Even a privately owned paper like Al Watan in Saudi Arabia must toe the government line in reporting on domestic politics and personalities.

The biggest influence on much of the media coverage has come from the satellite news channel Al Jazeera, which started broadcasting from Qatar in 1996. It made its name with on-the-spot coverage of the Palestinian uprising that gave viewers an unblinking look at bloody and broken bodies.

Many governments, aware that Al Jazeera is widely considered by Arab audiences to be credible, have allowed their own stations to run Jazeera footage of the war to demonstrate their own anti-war credentials. (On Wednesday, Al Jazeera announced that it was suspending its reporting from Iraq after the Iraqi government barred two of its correspondents in Baghdad.)

The rage against the United States is fed by this steady diet of close-up color photographs and television footage of dead and wounded Iraqis, described as victims of American bombs. In recent days, more and more Arabic newspapers have run headlines bluntly accusing soldiers of deliberately killing civilians.

Even for those accustomed to seeing such images from Arab coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the daily barrage of war coverage in newspapers and on hourly television reports has left many Arabs beside themselves with anger.

"He is `Shaytan,' that Bush," shouted Ali Hammouda, a newsstand operator in Cairo, using the Arabic word for Satan and pointing to a color photograph in one of his newspapers.

The image, published in many Arabic papers, showed the bodies of a stick-thin woman and a baby, said to be victims of American shelling in central Iraq. They were lying in an open wooden coffin, the baby's green pacifier still in its mouth.

"Your Bush says he is coming to make them free, but look at this lady," Mr. Hammouda exclaimed. "Is she free? What did she do? What did her baby do?"

Fahmi Howeidy, a prominent Islamist writer in Cairo, says the reactions are not necessarily pro-Saddam. "Of course we think Saddam Hussein will not continue in power, but if he resists for weeks, at least he will defend his image as a hero who could resist U.S. and British power," Mr. Howeidy said.

"If this happens, we can expect chaos in the Arab world, because we don't know how the people who already criticize Arab regimes will express their anger after that," he added.

"Maybe there would be an extremist group or a single person who would do something against the government. We don't know about the army, but maybe there are people who feel humiliated."